Covid Profiteering seems to be acceptable and accepted in the UK…
December 1778 George Washington said
“No
punishment, in my opinion, is too great for the man who can build his greatness
on his country’s ruin”
But a couple of hundred years later not a huge
amount had changed and wherever there is a crisis in the world you will find
someone making money out of other people’s misery – just look at the traffickers
pedalling watery graves for grubby money as the world fails and fails again to
care for its most vulnerable and displaced.
In 2007 new anti-war-profiteering legislation was
implemented in the US following damning evidence that the profiteers were at it
again during the Iraq invasion.
And – here we are in the UK in 2020 and the Tory cronies
are also at it - profiteering on the back of the misery of a pandemic; being
handed £multi-million contracts for equipment that has often not turned up or
been fit for purpose. The eye-watering amounts of money handed to them by the
very government mishandling the pandemic.
In WWII companies were fined for even minimal
profiteering e.g. selling over-priced apples. How times have changed under the
Prime Minister who erroneously and preposterously fantasises that he is some
sort of latter-day Churchill… Now it is the government not just turning a blind
eye to profiteering but sanctioning and facilitating it.
If you think the UK’s monumental failure over covid
is through lack of spending – you would be mistaken. Multiple news outlets have
covered the facts of the spending. In the first six months of the pandemic here
in the UK £18bn was spent, the vast majority with no element of oversight or
competition – Yes from the party that thinks of market forces and competition with
religious fervour. It is estimated that at least £1.5bn of contracts have gone
directly to pals of the Tory party. As the mother of a Doctor who worked in
A&E during the first wave and also a midwife – I know that PPE has been a
bad joke, a disaster when it could have made a difference in the early days. And
it’s no secret that some of those in receipt of these hugely lucrative
contracts have no experience in providing such equipment and have nothing
whatsoever to do with supplies of the kind required during a pandemic. And that
is before you look at appointments like those of ‘Dido’ Harding whose only
qualification for her appointment as head of the UK’s Test and Trace programme
seems to have been that she is married to a Tory MP. In case you missed it –
Test and Trace in the UK has been a complete and utter and is an ongoing
monumental FAILURE.
Yes this has been turned over in the press. Everyone
knows it’s going on but we are almost inured to it. If I had to describe the
collective response to the inevitable news that friends of the Tory party with
no relevant experience have been handed massively lucrative government
contracts it would be a sort of collective weary shrug. Some of these covid
contracts make the Brexit contract – the one given to the ferry company (by –
then transport minister Chris Grayling) with no ferries, look modest and well
considered.
But where is the outrage? During WWII many thought
the penalty for profiteering while troops were dying should have been the most
severe – well what is the difference now. Innocent ‘civilians’ and front line
workers have died. Are dying. Even the press have been mealy mouthed about it.
Search the headlines and you will find phrases like ‘chumocracy’ lots of
references to ‘cronyism’. It doesn’t really cover it does it. Is that because
we are beyond shock? We kind of expect it. And politics is all about managing
expectations – well, we have none where Tory morality is concerned. OR maybe it
is because the upper echelons of the media in the UK also operate the ‘chumocracy’
and it’s really difficult to come down hard on a system you subscribe to.
We must outlaw profiteering from human crises and
not just the specific crisis of war. It must include the profiteering of being
promoted to a post one is wholly unsuited to or qualified for as that is simply
profiteering through another door. But who would need to bring that legislation
in? Oh yes, the government currently facilitating the profiteering…
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